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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
TWELVE GATES: A Study in Catholicity 



THE MEANING 
OF EDUCATION 



BY 

JAMES H. SNOWDEN 



Mm} 



THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



5^ 



Copyright, 1921, by 
JAMES H. SNOWDEN 



OCI 26 1921 



Printed in the United States of America 



CIA630002 






CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction 9 

I. What is Education? 15 

1. Its General Idea. 

2. Education a Growth. 

3. Is It Right to Cultivate the Self.? 

n. Begins with the Body 23 

1. The Body as the Physical Basis of 

Life. 

2. The Education of the Body. 

ni. Development of the Intellect 31 

1. Sense Perception. 

2. Reasoning. 

3. Mental Associations. 

4. Memory. 

5. The Subconsciousness. 

6. Imagination. 

7. The Workshop of the Mmd. 

8. Knowledge and Intelligence. 

IV. The Sensibilities 50 

1. Kinds of Feelings. 

2. Uses of the Feelings. 

3. The Education of the Feelings. 

V. The Training of the Will 56 

1. The Attention. 

2. Motives. 

3. The Freedom of the Will. 



6 CONTENTS 

PAGE 

VI. The Education of the Spirit 65 

VII. Education as Habit 76 

1. What Is Habit? 

2. The Use of Habits. 

3. Rules for Forming Habits: 

(1) Begin with all your might. 

(2) Never suffer an exception in 

the practice of a habit. 

(3) Seize the first opportunity to 

act. 

(4) Keep the faculty of effort 

alive by gratuitous exer- 
cise. 

Vin. Education and Expression 87 

IX. Education and Appreciation 92 

X. Education and Efficiency 99 

XI. Education and Life 104 

Xn. Education and Service Ill 

XIII. Education and Public Support 114 

XIV. Education and Leadership 116 



Education commences at the mother*s knee, and 
every word spoken within the hearsay of little chil- 
dren tends toward the formation of character. — 
Eosea Ballon. 

Let the soldier be abroad if he will; he can do 
nothing in this age. There is another personage 
less imposing in the eyes of some, perhaps insignifi- 
cant. The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to 
him, armed with his primer, against the soldier in 
full military array. — Lord Brougham. 

The true purpose of education is to cherish and 
unfold the seed of immortality already sown within 
us; to develop, to their fullest extent, the capacities 
of every kind with which the God who made us has 
endowed us. — Mrs. Jameson. 

Education elevates a man above the pressure of 
material interests. It makes him superior to the 
pleasures and the pains of a world which is but his 
temporary home, filling his mind with higher sub- 
jects than the occupations of life will themselves 
provide him with. — James Anthony Froude. 

Till we all attain unto a full-grown man, unto the 
measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. 
— Paid. 



INTRODUCTION 

In beginning our study of the meaning 
and value of education as one of the 
chief goods of Hfe it is encouraging to 
consider that there is enough of this kind 
of wealth for us all. Few are the things 
of which there is enough to go around. 
There are not enough diamonds in all 
the world to bedeck every bridal finger, 
nor enough pearls to throw a string of 
them around the neck of every queen of 
beauty. There are not enough houses, 
and there are not even enough clothes 
for all the people in the world. 

It is physically impossible for us all 
to get rich, for if the total wealth of the 
world were equally divided among all 
its people, we would have only a few 
dollars apiece. There are a hundred mil- 
lions of us in this country, but only one 
of us can be President of the United 
States at the same time; and so very 
many of us must do without that office — 
at least for the present. In any empire 
there is room for only one royal crown, 

9 



INTRODUCTION 

and any rival crown would be quickly 
put down, though its suppression might 
cost thousands of lives. 

Material goods and external positions 
are strictly limited in quantity at any 
particular time, and whatever anyone 
gets from the common stock leaves just 
that much less for others. There is no 
way of avoiding or thwarting this physical 
fact and mathematical law, and this 
unrelenting limitation is at the bottom 
of much of the unrest and unhappiness 
and strife and tragedy of our human 
world. 

But this principle does not apply to 
mental and spiritual goods. When one 
man discovers or develops a truth, he 
does not leave that much less truth for 
others; on the contrary, he enlarges the 
field of truth for all other minds. Newton 
in discovering the law of gravitation did 
not thereby enrich only himself and im- 
poverish others, but he enormously widened 
the conceptions and multiplied the mental 
wealth of the world. 

Truth is of such a nature that it can- 
not be shut up within a mind, but it must 
be shared in order to possess it fully. 

10 



INTRODUCTION 

We do not know a truth clearly and vividly 
until we impart it to others, for the very 
process of teaching or telling it to others 
clarifies and deepens and enriches it in 
our own minds. For this reason the 
teacher is always the best scholar in his 
own class and is constantly learning more 
than any other member. 

Developed personality does not leave 
less room for other persons, but makes 
room for them and enables them to grow 
up toward the same height of attain- 
ment. Shakespeare, with his enormous 
genius and gigantic strides, did not crowd 
other dramatists off the stage; on the 
contrary, he made room for them and 
lifted them to a height they never would 
have attained had it not been for his 
contagious presence, for he inspired half a 
dozen minor poets to write dramas that 
can now with difficulty be distinguished 
from his own. Every great man helps to 
make other men around him great, and 
instead of crowding smaller men out of 
the world he causes them to grow to 
taller stature. 

Education belongs to this class of 
mental and personal goods which are un- 

11 



INTRODUCTION 

limited in quantity and are multiplied for 
others as each one acquires them for 
himseK. An educated mind is a mental 
infection in any community and imparts 
s(ome of its own spirit of inquiry and 
methods of sound thinking to other minds. 
And truth, which is the field and suste- 
nance of education, the bread on which 
it feeds and by which it grows, is as wide 
and unlimited as infinity and can be 
stopped by no terminal until it impinges 
on the frontiers of the universe and is 
lost in the omniscience of God. 

There is no danger, then, of the stock 
of knowledge being cornered by any 
monopoly or exhausted by any omnivorous 
minds; the supply can never run short 
for any of us, and we may set out on our 
quest for education with the assurance 
that we are aiming at no unattainable 
ideal or visionary dream, but are turning 
our feet into a path in which there is 
room for us all and striving for a crown 
we can all win and wear. 

For education is as democratic as hu- 
man nature itself. It is not a special 
privilege of a few and does not constitute 
an aristocracy of minds, but is the possi- 

12 



INTRODUCTION 

bility of all. The poorest peasant boy 
can as surely attain unto it as the mil- 
lionaire's heir or the king's son. Its 
door will open to any sincere and earnest 
knock and it asks for no golden key. 
Lincoln got it with a pine torch as his 
only light, and poverty cannot keep a 
resolute soul from this wealth and king- 
dom. 

We are not, then, in this presentation 
of the meaning and value of education 
exciting false hopes in the minds of our 
young people and starting them out on 
a vain quest, but we are simply opening a 
vision that may become the victory of 
every one of them. 



13 



WHAT IS EDUCATION? 

1. Its General Idea. The general idea 
of education is the leading out (educere) 
of our powers into full development. 
"Education," says Ruskin, "is the leading 
human souls to what is best, and the 
making what is best out of them." 

Various definitions of it have been offered 
that are helpful. Plato said : "The purpose 
of education is to give to the body and to 
the soul all the beauty and all the perfec- 
tion of which they are capable." John 
Stuart Mill wrote: "Education includes 
whatever we do for ourselves and whatever 
is done for us by others for the express 
purpose of bringing us nearer to the per- 
fection of our nature." Herbert Spencer 
said: "Education is the preparation for 
complete hving." Ruskin wrote: "Educa- 
tion is the leading human souls to what is 
best, and the making what is best out of 
them." 

A recent psychological definition is: 
15 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

"Education is the introduction of control 
into experience." This is a suggestive 
idea. Experience begins with the instinc- 
tive urge and activity of all our faculties, 
physical, mental and emotional, but if left 
alone they are wild-growing powers like 
weeds and run into all kinds of disorder. 
They need stimulation, guidance, and dis- 
cipline. Education imposes upon us from 
without control that comes from the wider 
and wiser experience of others, of parents, 
teachers, schools, literature, and of the 
race. If an infant were left to grow of 
itself, cut off from its human kind, it would 
hardly develop into a human being and, in 
fact, it would quickly perish. But even if 
it were fed and protected, it would grow 
into only a half -human, half -animal crea- 
ture: it is education that trains and dis- 
cipHnes it into a person and perhaps pushes 
it to the level and height of a supreme 
thinker or powerful personality. 

Huxley has given us a well-known de- 
scription of education as follows: "That 
man, I think, has had a liberal education 
who has been so trained in youth that his 
body is the ready servant of his will, 
and does with ease and pleasure all the 

16 



WHAT IS EDUCATION? 

work, as a mechanism, it is capable of; 
whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic en- 
gine, with all its parts of equal strength, 
and in smooth working order; ready, like 
a steam engine, to be turned to any kind 
of work, and spin the gossamers as well 
as forge the anchors of the mind; whose 
mind is stored with knowledge of the 
great fundamental truths of nature and 
of the laws of her operations; one who, 
no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, 
but whose passions are trained to come 
to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of 
a tender conscience; who has learned to 
love all beauty, whether of nature or of 
art, to hate all vileness, and to respect 
others as himself." 

This is a comprehensive definition and 
covers the whole man in body, mind, and 
heart. Education means the process by 
which this training is given, and it also 
means the result of this process in a fully 
developed personality. 

The Christian ideal of the perfect man 
as set forth in Scripture includes the same 
elements: a pure, healthy body ("a temple 
of the Holy Spirit"), disciplined into 
servitude to the will ("I bring it into sub- 

17 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

jection"), a developed mind, a noble 
heart, and an obedient will, all combined 
into symmetry and harmony, a full- 
statured, broad-visioned man ("a full- 
grown man") living in full fine relations 
with men and with God and growing up 
"unto the measure of the stature of the 
fullness of Christ." 

The educated man, then, is no narrow 
or defective person that lacks any essen- 
tial element of the strongest and finest 
manhood. He has no right to be ill- 
proportioned and misshapen, in any respect 
unlovely and repellent, round and rich 
on one side and shriveled and sour on 
another; but in him all excellent human 
qualities — the physical and the spiritual, 
the intellectual and the emotional, the 
passive and the active — should be com- 
bined and blended into symmetry and 
strength and fruitfulness. The highest 
attainable perfection of personality is the 
aim and end of education. 

2. Education a Growth. Education is, 
therefore, a growth. We are each one 
born as a bundle of possibilities, a germ 
that has in it the capacity of endless de- 
velopment. An ignorant man is not yet 

18 



WHAT IS EDUCATION? 

fully born, he is not yet unpacked; and 
the whole process of education from in- 
fancy to the end of life consists in un- 
folding these latent faculties into full- 
orbed development and power. 

Education is not, therefore, a posses- 
sion that can be inherited or bought or 
obtained as a special privilege, but it 
must be grown; it cannot be put on from 
without, like a new coat, but it must 
be developed from within. Everyone must 
grow this stalk of wheat in his own patch 
of ground, and this soil is his own soul. 

Growth is a slow process and takes 
time; and the slower the growth the hardier 
and more valuable is the product. A 
mushroom springs up in a night, but an 
oak sinks its roots down into the soil 
and grips the rocks and builds up its 
trunk and throws out its branches through 
the years, and it takes the giant Redwood 
thirty centuries to push its top up three 
or four hundred feet into the sun. A 
solid education must strike its roots deep 
and patiently grow up through many 
years, and even all life, for its process is 
never completed in this world. 

Already we are being warned against 
19 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

short-cuts to this attainment. Young 
people are often impatient of slow processes 
and want quick results; especially are they 
eager to get to work and play their part 
in life. But it is as foolish to rush into 
life unprepared as it would be to begin 
to build a house without first laying a 
solid foundation or to attempt to sing 
or to play a piano in public without first 
learning how. 

Many a person has stunted his personal 
development and injured his whole future 
by refusing to take time to get ready for 
his lifework Such haste is waste which 
strong crying and tears in after life can- 
not make good. Jesus himself took 
thirty years of preparation for only three 
years of work, and we are following his 
wisdom and patience when we take time 
to get ready for our work. 

S, Is It Right to Cultivate the Self? 
We sometimes hear advice to the effect 
that self-cultivation is wrong in theory 
and bad in practice. Even so eminent 
an educator as Woodrow Wilson is quoted 
as saying, in an address to the National 
Council of Boy Scouts, that "character is 
a by-product," and that "a man who 

W 



WHAT IS EDUCATION? 

devotes himself to the development of his 
own character will succeed in nothing 
except making a prig." 

This is strange talk to come from a 
schoolmaster, for is not the whole process 
of education from the kindergarten to 
the university a cultivation of the self? 
Are we not to build up a good body, a 
disciplined mind, and a noble heart? 
Is not "a man to examine himself," and 
see wherein he falls short and bring him- 
self up to higher standards? Are we not 
bidden to "love our neighbor as thyself"? 
Unless we first cultivate the self we shall 
have nothing of worth with which to love 
and serve others. 

True love of self is simply appreciating 
and guarding and developing our own 
worth and right and dignity, and such 
self-love must precede and condition other 
love, we must get a soul before we can 
give any service. Of course we should 
be on our guard against conceit and sel- 
fishness and morbid self -consciousness; 
and, of course, we can develop and culti- 
vate the self only as we serve others, 
for education is not an isolated personal 
but a social process and attainment. 

21 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

We can develop our own personality only 
as we help to develop other persons; we 
can get education only as we give it. 
But this fact does not annul the com- 
plementary fact that self -development has 
its necessary place in our life and is our 
primary duty. 



22 



II 

BEGINS WITH THE BODY 

1. The Body as the Physical Basis of 
Life. Education begins with the body, 
for at bottom we are bone and blood 
and brain. The body is the basis of 
all our life, mental and moral as well as 
physical. Body and soul are intimately 
interwoven into a mystic unity, and 
neither of these parts of our human per- 
sonality can be complete without the 
other. The body is the coarse material 
stem on which blooms the fine blossom 
of the spirit. And the breadth of the 
brain has something to do with the width 
of our thinking, and the volume and 
warmth of the blood with the fervency of 
the feelings and the force of the will. 

Body and soul also constantly interact 
and are mutually sensitive and sym- 
pathetic to each other's condition and 
operations. Every change in the body 
instantly reports itself in the soul, and 
every change in the soul at once affects 

23 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

the body. The body sends every sensory 
stimulus into the mind, and every thought 
and feehng and volition expresses itself 
through the body. The emotions paint 
themselves on the face, a sense of shame 
flooding it with scarlet, and fear blanch- 
ing it white; and the will controls all the 
voluntary muscles and through them acts 
upon the world. 

The body is thus a marvelous mechan- 
ism which is the nimble servant of the 
soul. Its hands and feet are the means 
by which man takes hold of the world 
and masters it, and his senses are so 
many fine feelers with which he reaches 
out and touches and interprets the world 
at every point and even feels his way 
out among the constellations to the most 
distant star. 

Not only is the body a wonderful ma- 
chine, but it also makes machines which 
are enormous extensions and reenforce- 
ments and refinements of its powers. 
Man's telescopes and microscopes are 
gigantic eyes which penetrate the depths 
of star spaces and peer down among 
molecules and atoms. His control of 
nature's energies enables him to pass with 

24 



BEGINS WITH THE BODY 

incredible speed across continents and 
seas, to prowl around, like a terrible 
shark, under the ocean; to take to the 
air and outfly the eagle, and to transmit 
his thoughts and the very tones of his 
voice over continental distances as in- 
stantaneously as the lightning's flash. 
His dynamite and deadly gases enable 
him to split open mountains and blast 
with death every living thing over wide 
areas of country, and his powerful ex- 
plosives and great guns have extended 
the reach of his arm to sixty miles and 
multiplied the punch of his fist millions 
of times. Humanity may well tremble at 
the mere thought of what the next great 
war may do; with airships loaded with 
bombs that will blot out cities and de- 
vastate countries. Man's wonderful and 
ever-increasing dominion over the earth 
and sea and air is the result of his mas- 
tery and extension of his own body, and 
there is no limit to this process. 

2. The Education of the Body, No won- 
der, then, that education should begin 
with the body, and a sound mind in a 
sound body must ever be the starting- 
point and chief initial capital of an edu- 

25 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

cated human being. Yet formerly the 
body was not included in the scheme of 
education and was not believed to have 
any necessary part or right to share in 
this process. It was thought, rather, to 
be the right thing for a student to be a 
pale-faced, hollow-chested, stoop-shoul- 
dered creature, panting for breath, and 
such things were almost taken to be signs 
if not proofs of one's being a scholar; 
but now they are only symptoms and 
evidence of bad breeding and wrong 
living. 

It is now seen that a well-developed 
body, symmetrical and strong, supple 
and sinewy, with straight bones, hard 
muscles, broad chest, rich blood, grace- 
ful carriage, and trained skill, is a vital 
part of education and lies at the founda- 
tion of the whole business. This is the 
meaning of the large place now given to 
athletics in the schools and colleges. The 
gymnasium now stands side by side with 
the library, and athletics is required along 
with mathematics and ethics. 

Physical education should begin in in- 
fancy and before birth — Oliver Wendell 
Holmes said we should start with our 

26 



BEGINS WITH THE BODY 

grandmothers — and then should be con- 
tinued through Hfe. It now begins in 
the primary school with a physiological 
and medical examination of the child. 
Hair and scalp, eyes and ears, nose and 
throat, heart and lungs, stomach and 
liver, muscles and bones, every organ is 
examined and defects are noted and 
remedial action is taken. Inspection now 
looks into the sanitary condition of the 
school and sees that every window is in 
the right place and every seat of the 
right size and shape. The child is thus 
given a chance to have a sound body, 
and this greatly improves its chance of 
having a sound mind. 

We are now realizing that ill health is 
a physical sin, if not personal, then 
hereditary or social, and that to permit 
a child to suffer from bad conditions is a 
social sin against its body and soul. The 
result is that our schools and colleges are 
now turning out fewer anemic weaklings, 
and more big, lusty fellows that have 
some brawn and breath that can back 
up their brains and carry them through 
life and stand the pace of to-day. 

The great war disclosed an unexpected 
27 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

amount of physical deficiency and in- 
efficiency in our American manhood. A 
considerable proportion, sometimes half, 
of our young men were rejected out- 
right on physical grounds, and most of 
them needed correction and reconstruc- 
tion at many points. The results of mil- 
itary training in the camps were surprising. 
Many a boy that left his home stoop- 
shouldered and hollow-chested and shuf- 
fled along dragging his feet after him, 
came back erect and full-chested, with 
color in his cheek and sparkle in his eye, 
and walked with a firm elastic step, so 
that his whole personality had undergone 
a marked transformation, and his very 
appearance attracted the attention and 
excited the wonder of his friends. The 
discipline of six months had made a new 
man of him 

This bodily education is of fundamental 
nature and value. Physical health is one 
of our greatest national assets, immensely 
outranking coal and iron. But we should 
not wait for a war and military training 
before we begin this discipline, but make 
it a vital part of all our education from 
infancy through the primary school up to 

^8 



BEGINS WITH THE BODY 

the college and university. We are doing 
this in an increasing degree, and this is 
one of the chief improvements in our 
modern education. 

Physical education, while it should not 
be overdone, and man should not be 
treated as though he were only an animal, 
thus has its rightful place in our educa- 
tional life and has come to stay. Every- 
one should have an elementary knowledge 
of his body in all its organs and conditions 
of health and should give it constant 
attention. Anything that injures its fine 
mechanism and delicate tissues is a physi- 
cal sin, and all harmful indulgences should 
be ruled out of life as so many sharp 
knives and deadly poisons that cut and 
destroy our vital organs. 

Especially should everyone know and 
obey the laws of health as to proper food 
and air and sunshine and exercise and 
sleep, work and play. There are billions 
of cells in us, and when any of these are 
permitted to become dormant and then 
dead they are so much poisonous debris 
in the system and are the seeds of disease 
and death. There are simple exercises by 
which one can daily stir into activity all 

29 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

these cells and thus keep the whole body 
alive and healthy. 

And, of course, every one should train 
his body into some kind of skill that is 
useful in the way of productive work or 
recreation or artistic expression and joy. 
Skill in handcraft not only provides a 
means of making- a living, but it also reacts 
on the mind and develops in it a sense of 
reality and practical efficiency that can 
hardly otherwise be attained and that is of 
high value in any field of life. "Health" 
is only another spelling of "holiness" and 
both are only variations of the word 
"wholeness," and this fact is an indication 
of how deep-seated and vital to our whole 
welfare, physical and mental and spiritual, 
is the education of the body and of what 
constant attention and care we should give 
to it. 



30 



Ill 

DEVELOPMENT OF THE 
INTELLECT 

Th^- intellect is the knowing power of 
the mind, and it unfolds into the faculties 
or activities of sense perception, concepts, 
reasoning, mental association, memory, 
and imagination. 

1. Sense Perception. Sense perception is 
the consciousness of external objects when 
the mind is stirred into activity by the 
excitation of the senses. These are the 
organs of sight, sound, smell, taste, and 
touch, which are nerve ends differentiated 
and adapted to receive various kinds of 
sensory impressions. Each of these won- 
derful organs sends its distinctive kind of 
nerve wave or shock up to its special 
center in the brain, which is thus a cen- 
tral telephone exchange receiving and 
sending messages from and to every part 
of the world. 

The mind now has the wonderful and 
quite mysterious power of interpreting or 

31 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

experiencing these molecular changes in 
the brain as perceptions of the external 
objects producing them. When two or 
more perceptions arrive from the same 
external object, as the color, odor, and 
taste of an orange, these several percepts 
combine into a unitary percept or con- 
struct, which is the object as we know 
it in the mind. When an individual per- 
cept or construct, such as an apple, is 
released from its local context in con- 
sciousness and made to stand for or repre- 
sent all apples, or the class or general 
idea of an apple, it is then called a concept. 

These percepts and concepts are the 
representatives in our minds of the real- 
ities of the objective world, and it is 
therefore of the first importance that 
they represent them accurately. They 
are the constituent elements or cut stones 
or pressed bricks out of which we build 
our world. But if the bricks in a build- 
ing, or even one brick, is of the wrong 
size or shape or is warped, it may throw 
the whole structure out of plumb and 
may even endanger its stability. 

We thus see the fundamental impor- 
tance of forming correct percepts and con- 

3£ 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECT 

cepts. Any inaccuracy or error in them, 
caused by inattention, ignorance, mental 
blindness, self-interest, prejudice, or pas- 
sion, will throw us out of gear and right 
working relations with reality; it will 
ramify and pervert all our ideas and plans; 
and it may undermine and ruin our whole 
structure of thought and life. 

Keen and accurate senses are a high 
attainment and are the basis of right 
thinking and successful achievement in 
every field. The way we see things de- 
termines the way we say them, and thus 
accurate observation is the foundation of 
truth and truth-speaking. The way we 
see and hear and touch things is also the 
way we endeavor to control and use them; 
and so if our observation of them is loose 
and inaccurate and a misfit, we shall miss 
connection with reality and wander around 
blindly in the world. Trained senses are 
of primary and immense importance as 
the means of sound thinking and practical 
mastery of things in life. 

We should then give the greatest care 
to the education of our senses. In seeing 
things we should train our vision so that 
we shall see clearly and correctly, and not 

33 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

see blurred and blotted, distorted and per- 
verted images of ^ them; and so with all 
the other senses. In seeing accurately 
the shape of a leaf or the color of a bit 
of ribbon or the letters in a word or the 
figures in a problem we may be deter- 
mining something of far-reaching impor- 
tance. 

We should beware of mixing up our 
subjective opinions and prejudices, and 
especially our own interests and desires, 
with objective reality, and thus shaping 
and coloring it to suit our own ends. Of 
course we must interpret things in the 
light of our own knowledge, and this is 
a reason why we should be constantly 
stocking our minds with richer stores of 
knowledge that we may ever see a richer 
world. In a sense we make the things 
we see, for we contribute to them the 
contents of our own minds, so that we 
see things not only as they are but also 
as we are. 

But this process does not justify us in 
contributing any false color or element to 
our perception. We might suppose that 
as we all have the same senses we would 
all see and hear the same things. But 

34 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECT 

this is not so. Our senses are subject to 
growth and education, and we all see 
things according to our own mental 
development. In fact, everyone sees his 
own world; and to one it may be a meager 
and colorless world, and to another it is 
something rich and splendid. 

Just to perceive reality as it is: this is 
the foundation of truth and honesty; it 
goes deep into our character and success 
in life; and we should give to it our ut- 
most training and care. 

2. Reasoning. The process by which the 
mind works with its percepts and con- 
cepts is its reasoning power. This con- 
sists of comparing, discriminating, ana- 
lyzing, and classifying its percepts and 
concepts, or its images of objects and its 
general ideas, so as to discern their rela- 
tions, logically combine them into larger 
units, trace their connections and especially 
their causal links, and deduce their con- 
sequences; and thus we build up our 
knowledge into judgments and proposi- 
tions and systems and draw practical 
conclusions. 

Thus starting with tiny visual images in 
his eyes and percepts and concepts in his 

35 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

mind, the astronomer combines these into 
grand generalizations and constructs a 
sublime system for the whole stupendous 
heavens. Every other scientist in like 
manner perceives and construes the facts 
in his special field, and thus our knowledge 
grows from more to more. Each one of 
us thus reasons out his own conclusions 
and plans and purposes and builds his 
own world. 

The judgments we form in our minds 
by our reasoning are the real tools with 
which we work, the hands and feet with 
which we actually take hold of the world 
and move and mold it to our purposes. 
It is, therefore, of primary importance 
that we learn to reason correctly and 
work out right judgments, for a wrong 
judgment is a broken rail or an unbridged 
chasm in our track that will inevitably 
throw us into the ditch. 

The reason one man succeeds and an- 
other fails generally is that the successful 
man forms right judgments that run 
before him like a steel track to carry him 
with safety and certainty to his objective, 
whereas the unsuccessful man forms un- 
sound and visionary plans that go to 

36 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECT 

pieces on the rocks of reality. Education 
at bottom is thus good judgment, or 
common sense raised to its highest power, 
and we must develop and exercise this 
power or our doom will be upon us. 

3. Mental Associations. Association of 
ideas is the tendency they have of cling- 
ing together so that when one arises in 
the mind it brings others with it. It is 
our constant familiar experience that one 
object or idea suggests another. The 
sight of a raincloud suggests the idea of 
an umbrella, and this idea may suggest 
the fact that the one we have was bor- 
rowed from a neighbor, possibly without 
his consent or knowledge. The sight of a 
little lock of hair or a glimpse of the 
old home crowds the mind with a thou- 
sand fond recollections too deep for tears. 
When any idea enters the mind it quickly 
draws to itself a cluster of associations, 
as when a magnet is thrust into a keg of 
nails it comes out thickly incrusted with 
the bits of iron. 

These associations often seem accidental 
and whimsical, but they are really gov- 
erned by beautiful laws that spin threads 
of connection between ideas that at first 

37 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

seem to have no possible relation. The 
most common of these laws are contiguity 
in time and place, similarity and contrast, 
and causal connection. Objects and ideas 
that have been experienced together once 
are apt to appear together again, and any 
object tends to suggest its likeness or 
contrast, or cause or consequence. 

Every object and idea and word is 
surrounded with a fringe or atmosphere of 
associations, and as every mind has its 
own stock of knowledge, words and ideas 
have very different meanings and sug- 
gestions for different minds. The idea of 
a prison has a vastly different connotation 
or meaning for a convict than for one 
who has never been inside prison walls, 
or the word "music" for the musician 
than for one without musical training or 
sense. These associations give breadth 
and depth and wealth of meaning to words 
and objects as the overtones in music 
give character and richness to musical 
notes. 

It is the number and variety of the 
associations with which our minds are 
stored that constitute the width and 
wealth and power of our mental life. 

38 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECT 

Every mind organizes around an idea its 
entire contents. It perceives every new 
trutli in the light of and brings it into 
relation with its existing knowledge, a 
process which is called apperception. 

One mark of a* man of genius is the 
immense range and variety of his asso- 
ciations by which he calls the whole world 
so far as he knows it to his aid to illustrate 
and illuminate his ideas; and the poverty 
and impotence of an ignorant or feeble 
mind is the meagerness of it^ associations. 
Multiply your associations, store your 
mind with large stocks of facts and ideas 
through observation and reading, and you 
will thus have a reservoir in your mind 
that you can tap on any subject and draw 
forth streams of thought and power. 
This is one result and value of education. 

4. Memory. Memory is the conserving 
power of the mind, its capacity to store 
up and retain and recall its experiences. 
It is the treasure house of life in which 
all its past is packed away and out of 
which our associations emerge; it is the 
thread of continuity that binds all our 
days together into conscious unity. With- 
out the power of memory we would not 

39 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

be conscious of our past and would not 
even know ourselves as identical persons 
from day to day. It is thus the spinal 
column of personality. 

While memory is not the highest power 
of the mind and is related to conservation 
rather than to initiative and progress, yet 
it is fundamental and enters vitally into 
our whole life. Its cardinal virtues are 
quick reception, vivid impression, tenacity 
of retention, and readiness of recall, and 
it thus puts our whole stock of knowledge 
and experience at our fingers' ends. It 
should be disciplined and strengthened in 
early life and trained into an expert 
librarian and ready servant that will on 
demand produce any fact or idea from the 
stack room and pigeon-holes of the mind. 

5. The Subconsciousness. The subcon- 
sciousness is that part of our mental life 
that lies below the threshold of con- 
sciousness. The conscious mind is subject 
to great fluctuations in its volume and 
level, and from the heights of intense and 
glowing thought and feeling it sinks down 
through dullness and drowsiness and sleep 
into a state of inactivity of which no 
memory remains. Memory has its store- 

40 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECT 

house in this deep. All our mental asso- 
ciations and past experiences and habits 
and instincts are packed away in its 
receptacles and emerge at call from these 
hidden chambers in this underground 
world of the soul. 

There is reason to think that this sub- 
conscious life of the soul is large compared 1 
with its conscious life. As seven eighths of 
an iceberg is under the surface of the sea, 
so the greater part of our life is submerged 
in these depths. This is the night life of 
the soul, full of shadows and ghosts and 
stars. 

The subconsciousness plays a part of 
immense importance in our life. All our 
past and even our heredity and racial 
ancestry are sleeping in these deep cham- 
bers so that nothing is ever lost out of 
our life. Up out of this huge cellar come 
swarming through its trapdoors and back 
stairways of memory and association the 
experiences of the past to reenforce the 
present. Suggestion has the power of 
tapping this subterranean reservoir and 
letting it gush up in jets of thought and 
feeling. 

Everything we put into our souls will 
41 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

sooner or later come out of them. Long 
years afterward on the most unexpected 
occasion and in the most startKng ways, 
"old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles 
long ago" will come thronging up out of 
this dark chamber to strengthen and com- 
fort us, or, like ghosts out of their graves, 
to trouble and plague us. The admonition 
of psychology and education at this point 
is, "Keep thy heart with all diligence; 
for out of it are the issues of life." 

6. Imagination. Imagination is the pic- 
ture-making power of the mind. It begins 
with memory images, which are bits of 
imagination, and it constructs images or 
pictures of objects and scenes from the 
stores of memory. 

A deeper use of the imagination is its 
power of realizing objects that lie beyond 
the immediate range of the senses and 
contact of the mind with reality. It is 
the mental process by which we translate 
symbols, such as words and mathematical 
signs which only stand for things, into 
the meaning and power of the things 
themselves. Thus in studying geography 
and history the mind has certain informa- 
tion about places and events that are not 

42 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECT 

immediately before it: imagination takes 
these statements, which are Kttle more 
than symbols, and translates them into 
images which we see almost or altogether 
as vividly as though the realities them- 
selves were present to us; it clothes these 
skeletons with flesh and blood so that 
they breathe and move. 

Knowledge is never digested and assim- 
ilated into our thought and experience, it 
never becomes alive and moves us, until 
we thus turn it into pictures or vivid 
images that may be as vital and vigorous 
as the living realities. In all our studies 
we should visualize our knowledge and 
turn it into living experience. 

A still higher activity of this faculty 
is the creative imagination which con- 
structs pictures, plans, ideals, and visions 
of its own; and thus 

"... bodies forth the forms of things unknown. 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name." 

It is the creative imagination th^t pro- 
duces all the glories of literature and art 
and all the great achievements of men. 
Men of genius are eminently the chil- 
43 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

dren of their imagination; they see visions 
that unveil the beauty of the world. A 
poet sees fairy fancies and grand cathedrals 
of poetic thought, and, with his "eye 
in a fine frenzy rolling," he puts them 
into immortal lines. The painter sees in 
the gallery of his imagination a picture 
of fair features and glowing colors and 
deep meaning, and his brush copies it 
on canvas. A sculptor sees an angel in 
a block of marble, and his chisel sets it 
free until it begins to breathe. A musician 
hears in the chamber of his heart sweet 
strains and grand harmonies, and he 
flings them out through his voice or his 
instrument upon the air. It is by the 
same power that we frame our plans and 
purposes, set up our ideals, and see 
visions which we then strive to realize in 
conduct and character. 

Imagination, then, is no visionary and 
vain exercise of the mind. It is true there 
is a form of this faculty, the fancy, that 
does cut loose from sober reality and soars 
off on a light and airy wing; and such 
imagination may lead us into daydreaming 
in an unreal world; and when this is in- 
dulged in to excess it is apt to become 

44 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECT 

unwholesome and harmful, weakening the 
will for common work and breeding dis- 
content. 

But imagination proper is the most 
powerful creative faculty of the mind. 
It is by this power that man dreams 
dreams and that over his path hover 
visions that coax and woo him on to 
larger and lovelier things. He follows 
their gleam, he hitches his wagons to 
their stars and rises from common dusty 
roads to celestial highways. 

The world has learned to beware of how 
it stands in the way of imagination: that 
invisible impalpable power may have in it 
more than ten thousand bayonets or a 
million tons of dynamite and may crush 
mountains, shape the centuries, and create 
a new world. 

7. The Workshop of the Mind. We have 
thus looked into the workshop of the 
mind and noted the mental machinery by 
which it turns out the products of thought. 
The senses perceive the objective world, 
reasoning combines percepts into judg- 
ments, association enriches any object 
in the consciousness by causing all affil- 
iated ideas to flock around it, memory 

45 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

conserves the experiences of life and 
stores them away in the subconsciousness, 
and imagination paints pictures in the 
mind and creates new ideals which lift 
life to higher levels. 

It is the work of education to develop 
and train all of these intellectual faculties 
into full maturity and skill. This is done 
through the courses of study in the 
schools and by the exercise of the mind by 
the student in mastering these subjects. 
The mind grows by use just as do the 
muscles of the body, and knowledge is the 
mental food that feeds and develops it. 

All the faculties of the mind have an 
affinity and craving for truth, and they 
have an enormous capacity and appetite 
for it which can never be satisfied. The 
human mind is omnivorous and will 
ravage all fields of truth and eat up the 
earth and sun and stars. The student 
must whet up his mental appetite and 
devour great quantities of facts and ideas 
and thus feed his mind on the most 
liberal diet. 

But even more important than acquir- 
ing large stocks of knowledge is the de- 
veloping of his power to digest and assim- 

46 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECT 

ilate facts and ideas into his own experience 
so that his knowledge will not be the 
second-hand contents of other men's minds 
and of his memory, but the first-hand 
products of his own mental activities. 
Memory may be only a pipe tapping and 
draining off other men's reservoirs of 
knowledge, but reasoning is a fountain 
within the mind ever springing up in 
new ideas of its own. 

To this discipline of the mind the 
student must give his patient study 
through months and years. If the work 
is a drudgery to him, he must endeavor 
to kindle his interest in it so that it will 
become his delight. If he will hold his 
mind on a subject, it will begin, under 
the play of mental association, to gleam 
with light and to develop new points of 
interest until it will become the glowing 
focus and hot spot in his consciousness 
and may become his enthusiasm and pas- 
sion. Mental power is a long and slow 
growth, and he who would acquire it 
must pay its price in toil. There is no 
royal road or short-cut to education, and 
only by becoming a slave to its demands 
can one become its master. 

47 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

8. Knowledge and Intelligence. We may 
note, in leaving this part of our subject, 
the important distinction between knowl- 
edge and intelligence. We are apt to 
confuse the two and to think that one 
who has his mind and memory stored with 
large funds of knowledge is necessarily an 
educated person; but such a person may 
have very little education or mental power, 
just as a furnace may be crammed with 
fuel and yet contain little fire and heat: 
in fact, the fuel may only smother the fire; 
or the mind may be stuffed with knowl- 
edge as the stomach may be overloaded 
with food while it has little digestive 
power. 

Knowledge is information: intelligence 
is developed and disciplined mind. Knowl- 
edge is a possession : intelligence is a power. 
Knowledge does not necessarily produce 
or imply intelligence: intelligence produces 
knowledge. Knowledge is static and pas- 
sive: intelligence is dynamic and active. 
Knowledge receives: intelligence creates. 
Knowledge handles the old and familiar 
and is disconcerted with the new: intel- 
ligence is stimulated by the new and 
meets and masters novel situations and 

48 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECT 

problems. Knowledge drills, and intelli- 
gence thrills. Knowledge is useful and 
necessary, great widths and immense 
stores of it in the mind by so much en- 
large and enrich life, but intelligence is 
the principal thing, for only intelligence 
is power, and with all our getting in edu- 
cation we should develop intelligence. 



49 



IV 

THE SENSIBILITIES 

The sensibility is the power of the soul 
to experience feeling, or a state of excite- 
ment. The feelings are an infinite com- 
plex, shading into one another like the 
evanescent hues of a sunset, and they do 
not admit of such exact analysis and 
classification as the faculties of the in- 
tellect. They fall, however, into several 
broad classes. 

1. Kinds of Feelings. Sensations are 
feelings caused by direct physical action 
on the nerves. They include, first, the 
excitations of the senses. The degree of 
feeling in the senses varies, being very 
slight in normal sight and most pro- 
nounced in touch. Besides the senses, 
there are numberless organic feelings 
throughout the body. Every sensory 
nerve in the body is sensitive to irrita- 
tion and is ready to respond with its 
peculiar feeling. 

A second general class of feelings are 
50 



THE SENSIBILITIES 

the emotions, which are feeKngs caused by 
the presentation to the mind of an object 
or idea. The sight of an enemy may 
throw the soul into a violent state of fear, 
and of a friend may kindle it into a glow 
of love or joy. Every object or idea tends 
to produce its own peculiar feeling, and 
there may thus be as many shades of 
emotion as there are objects; but they 
fall into a few general classes, such as 
fear and hope, hatred and love, joy and 
sorrow, antipathy and sympathy, the 
sublime and the ridiculous, aspiration and 
reverence, and these may range in degree 
from a mere tendency or slight stir of 
feeling to the greatest intensity. 

Feelings have a pain or pleasure tone, 
which is often their most distinctive and 
compelling characteristic. Every feeling, 
whether of sensation or emotion, has this 
quality. The physical sensations are at- 
tended with the pains and pleasures of 
the senses and appetites or organic feel- 
ings, and a mere idea may flood the soul 
with pleasure or send flames of agony 
leaping through it. All of our feelings may 
be arranged and marshaled under these 
two master captains of the soul. 

51 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

Every person also has a prevailing 
emotional tone or disposition which is a 
native inheritance and is persistent through 
life, though subject to some control and 
slow modification by the will. A tem- 
perament is the emotional pitch to which 
one is keyed and is the tonic note of all 
his music. It is the sounding-board 
which gives quality to all his moods, as 
sanguine or phlegmatic, choleric or mel- 
ancholy. It is an emotional lens that 
gives character and color to all his expe- 
riences. All our mental states sift through 
our peculiar temperament, as light through 
a stained-glass window, and are tinged 
with its hues. 

2. Uses of the Feelings. The broad use 
of the feelings is to promote the volume 
and value of life and give it interest and 
motive. Pleasure attends and stimulates 
such activities of body and mind as in 
the long run are conducive to life, and 
pain accompanies such activities as in 
like manner injure or hinder it. 

It is the feelings that give us a sense 
of the value of objects. Pure intellect 
perceives facts and relations, but not 
worths. One object is as truly a part 

52 



THE SENSIBILITIES 

of reality as another, and the intellect 
thinks only in terms of factual existence 
and not of value. But the interest of 
life resides in our feelings. It is not until 
our ideas strike these mystic strings and 
wake them into music or discord that 
they excite our interest. The feelings are 
like the box of the violin or the sounding- 
board of the piano: the strings would give 
forth only thin and insignificant tones 
if they were not reenforced by these 
resonators which sympathetically catch up 
their vibrations and give them volume 
and depth, richness and sweetness. And 
so out of our feelings arise the joys and 
sorrows, the triumphs and tragedies of 
life. 

The feelings are also the immediate 
motives that move the will. There is no 
tendency for the will to act until the 
feelings pour their flood upon it as a 
stream upon a wheel, or as steam into 
the cylinder upon the piston that drives 
the engine. Objects and ideas generate 
feelings of sensation and emotion, and 
these accumulate volume and pressure 
until they overcome the inertia or inde- 
cision or opposition of the will and push 

53 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

it into action or explode it as a spark 
explodes powder. Pain and pleasure espe- 
cially are imperious forces tbat move the 
will and guide and govern life. 

3. The Education of the Feelings. The 
feelings are subject to development and 
control, refinement and enrichment as are 
our other mental faculties. The emotions 
are generated and governed by our ideas, 
and our ideas are largely subject to our 
control, and thus we can select and in- 
tensify and control our emotions. By 
suppressing and starving unworthy feel- 
ings and stimulating and feeding good 
ones we can slowly acquire a wholesome 
and happy, unselfish and noble emotional 
disposition. 

Reading literature charged with pure 
and deep emotion is a good education 
for the feelings. It develops them in 
strength and sensitiveness and trains them 
in that delicacy and refinement which we 
call taste and which is the mark of cul- 
ture and fine character. We can also 
develop proper feelings by practice and 
drill them into the heart as habits. 

Less attention has been given in educa- 
tion to the feelings than to the intellect, 

54 



THE SENSIBILITIES 

and yet they are a deeply vital part of 
character and life. The lack of fine feel- 
ings is likely to indicate selfishness and 
boorishness, and no one can be counted 
educated who does not have this part 
of his nature richly developed and properly 
trained. 



55 



V 
THE TRAINING OF THE WILL 

The will is the power of the soul to 
control itself in its thoughts and feelings, 
decisions and actions. The whole con- 
sciousness is a stream of activity, sinking 
into the subconscious deeps in sleep and 
then rising into a tumultuous torrent and 
overflowing the banks of the soul. 

This stream, however, is not an un- 
governable flood, sweeping everything be- 
fore it, on which the will floats as a 
helpless log or drifts as a boat without 
engine or rudder. The will has a large 
control over the stream and flood; it 
has a rudder in its hand and an engine 
in its boat by which it can steer and 
drive it in any direction to its own self- 
chosen destination. 

1. The Attention, The will first exer- 
cises its power in attention. As the 
word means, this is a "stretching" or 
striving of the mind toward an object. 
The mind can pick out any particular 



THE TRAINING OF THE WILL 

object or idea from among the swarms of 
ideas in the consciousness and concentrate 
its attention upon it, while other ideas are 
crowded into the background. 

Once the attention is fixed on an ob- 
ject a wonderful process sets in. The 
associations of the mind begin to grav- 
itate to the central object in an increasing 
mass. At the same time these associated 
ideas kindle their appropriate emotions, 
and thus add their fuel and fire to the 
central mass and turn it into a blazing 
heap that becomes the burning focus of 
consciousness. The attention is thus like 
a searchlight which can be swung around 
over a city or landscape at night and 
wherever it stops there the spot on which 
it rests becomes visible and brightly 
luminous, while other parts of the land- 
scape fall back into the night. Wherever 
the attention is stopped and held in the 
field of consciousness, that becomes the 
glowing center of the mind. 

Now, this act of attention is the primary 
power of the mind and goes far toward 
measuring one's whole mental ability. 
Really, the only thing we can do with 
our mind is to hold it on an object until 

57 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

our associations gather around it and pour 
their fuel upon it and set it on fire. The 
student should give his utmost endeavor 
to developing his attention so that it will 
tenaciously hold his mind on a subject 
and not let it constantly wander off, 
perhaps with the fool's eyes, to the ends 
of the earth. "This one thing I do" 
should be our determination. 

We cannot force ourselves to do a 
thing by a sheer act of will: we can only 
hold our attention on it until it grows and 
generates enough interest and feeling by 
its own associations to set the will in 
action. The self-control by which the 
w^ill can concentrate the mind on a sub- 
ject and stick to it is the root of educa- 
tion and of personality; and education 
should aim to develop and discipline this 
primary power of attention. 

2. Motives. This brings us to the fact, 
familiar in our experience, that the will 
is not an arbitrary action of the mind, 
but a rational process, taking place under 
the play of motives. A motive is any 
influence tending to move the mind, and 
motives are of several kinds. 

The first motives are instincts. An 
58 



THE TRAINING OF THE WILL 

instinct is that which instigates or "stings" 
us into action, as the word means. It is 
an inherited constitutional tendency to 
act in a certain way when the appro- 
priate condition or stimulus is present. 
It is a reflex response, a latent impulse 
or coiled-up spring ready to act as soon 
as it is released. 

The important fact about instincts is 
that they express and satisfy the funda- 
mental needs of life by their automatic 
action. They urge us into action along 
the line of these necessities before we are 
able to reason them out and consciously 
supply their demands. It is imperative 
that we should eat and sleep and work 
and play, and nature does not wait for 
us to find out these needs and discover 
and supply the means of satisfying them, 
but it has put springs within us which 
are released at the touch of the proper 
natural stimuli and push us into action 
before we reflect on the process. Yet in 
time these instincts emerge into the field 
of consciousness and reason, and then 
they are subject to and often need 
enlightenment and education and control. 

Next, ideas of action are incipient mo- 
59 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

tives. The moment we think of an action 
we experience an inclination to do that 
thing, as when we look down from a 
height the idea of jumping down suggests 
itself and we then feel an impulse to give 
way to the idea. Ideas become proper 
motives only when they are duly con- 
sidered and accepted. 

Our conscious desires and ends are our 
proper motives. A desire is a complex 
mental state consisting of an idea and a 
feeling, an idea of an end or object to 
be attained and a feeling of craving for 
it, or, it may be, antipathy to it. Desires 
cover the whole field of life, embracing 
the infinite manifold of our cravings. 
The two master desires are for the pos- 
session and enjoyment of good and for 
escape from evil, these corresponding with 
the two primary feelings and forces of 
pleasure and pain. 

These motives are subject to growth. 
They may appear in the mind as mere 
sparks of light or germs of perception and 
desire, but as the mind dwells on them 
associations begin to deepen and enrich 
and intensify them and thus they grow 
into a luminous center that fills the whole 

60 



THE TRAINING OF THE WILL 

soul with light and heat and drives the 
will into action. Our motives are thus 
subject to education and control. 

3. TJie Freedom of the Will. This leads 
us to the important point of the freedom 
of the will or of the soul. Motives are 
not forces thrust upon us from without, 
but they grow up within and are our 
own children. They are not only born 
of our own nature, but they are subject 
to our deliberation and selection. They 
compete for our approval, but they do 
not compel it. We consider and weigh 
and evaluate them and choose them ac- 
cording to our own standards. 

We not only choose, but we make our 
own motives and determine their weight, 
for it is in our own power to strengthen 
or weaken them by increasing or de- 
creasing their associations so that they 
grow into overmastering heat and power 
or wither in.to paleness and impotency. 
We can feed a motive into fatness and 
lusty strength, or we can starve and 
strangle it to death; and in this power 
lies the very core and certainty of our 
freedom and responsibility. 

The will is thus the captain of the soul 
61 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

and the crown of its sovereignty, pregnant 
with victory and glory or defeat and 
shame. It builds man's world, tossing 
mountains out of his path and creating 
a vast splendid civilization, carves char- 
acter and determines destiny; and every 
man, however humble and bound in by 
circumstance, is, not a wind-blown bub- 
ble on the sea or atom in the storm of 
the world, 

"But this main miracle, that thou art thou, 
With power on thine own act and on the world.'* 

It is, therefore, one of the chief aims 
and ends of education to develop and 
train the will into self-control in the power 
of attention, in the proper evaluation and 
selection of its motives, and in the in- 
tensification of them so that they will 
act with decisive force. Such a will is the 
real measure of a man. A strong will 
is not to be confused with a wayward, 
willful, selfish, and passionate will, for 
these traits are the marks of a weak will. 
A man in convulsions is not a strong 
man though it may take ten men to hold 
him: he is the strong man who can hold 
himself. "He that is slow to anger is 

62 



THE TRAINING OF THE WILL 

better than the mighty; and he that 
ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a 
city." 

The three fundamental faculties of the 
soul, as we have now seen, are intellect, 
sensibility, and will. This is their logical 
order of action, though they are inter- 
blended and simultaneous in their activ- 
ities, one of them usually being dominant 
at a time in consciousness. 

The human soul is thus a three-cycle 
engine. In normal behavior intellect acts 
first and produces thought; thought kin- 
dles feeling; and feeling moves the will. 
The action of the will results and rests 
in a state of satisfaction, which is the 
end of the particular movement. But this 
state or end at once suggests or stirs 
another movement of the intellect, and 
then the process begins all over again; 
and thus the mind keeps turning through 
its cycle and runs its endless round. 

The observance of this order is of the 
first importance in education and in life. 
The rational way of controlling ourselves 
and achieving our ends, developing our 
personality into full-grown maturity, and 
building our character and determining 

63 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

our destiny is to choose and develop the 
proper ideas and ideals, which are then 
to be enriched and intensified until they 
generate the appropriate feelings and mo- 
tives, which will then determine and drive 
the will into action. Our responsibility 
roots back in our ideas and begins with 
our primary attention by which we make 
our decisive choices. 



64 



VI 

THE EDUCATION OF THE SPIRIT 

If education were to stop with the body 
and the mind, it would have reached a 
considerable height, but not a summit 
with a clear sky over it and stars shining 
high above it. It would still be a build- 
ing that had a good foundation but had 
not risen above the second or third story. 
It would only be a hut squat on the 
ground that could not house a lofty human 
spirit. 

Without the higher life to control and 
inspire the lower life, education is only a 
danger, and may be a curse. It is then 
only a sharp and powerful tool which a 
bad man can use as skillfully and effi- 
ciently^ as a good man. There are uni- 
versity-trained bank embezzlers and bur- 
glars as well as college-trained bank cashiers 
and presidents. Such an educated man 
may be an educated monster, a very 
devil of cunning and selfish and malignant 
power. 

65. 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

Education divorced from conscience and 
character lay at the root of the material- 
ism and militarism of Germany and 
helped to lead her into the unspeakable 
crime and ruin of the Great War. A 
godless education is the curse of any 
nation that nurses this viper in its bosom. 

The faculties of conscience and faith, 
of right character and conduct, of right- 
eousness and reverence, are as much 
involved and as rightfully have a share 
in the process of education as the organs 
of the body and the faculties of the mind. 
The heart is biologically older than the 
brain and has deeper and more vital 
needs and aspirations. The deep instincts 
and mystic feelings of the heart are vastly 
more important in governing our char- 
acter and conduct than is our thinking; 
for life is immensely more than logic and 
it is surprising how little part our reason- 
ing really plays in our practical decisions 
and conduct. 

Plants and trees blossom at the top, 
and so does the human spirit. In its 
moral and spiritual nature it flowers out 
into its finest and richest life. This 
nature, then, ought not to be neglected 

66 



THE EDUCATION OF THE SPIRIT 

while the lower nature is being developed, 
but the spirit also is to be cultivated and 
enriched. 

Developed conscience i's sensitiveness to 
right and wrong, with a resolute determina- 
tion and habit of spurning the wrong and 
following the right. It is an intensely 
social sense, having due and strict regard 
to the rights and interests and welfare of 
others. It crystallizes its decisions and 
principles into habits and dispositions 
which become the permanent states of 
the soul out of which all its actions 
spring. It subordinates appetite and pas- 
sion and self-interest to its decision and 
control. Conscience thus comes to its 
splendid coronation and is clothed and 
crowned with royal rights and power. 

Religion is our conscious relation to 
God. All men sustain constant and intimate 
unconscious relations to God, as in him they 
necessarily live and move and have their 
being. They can no more escape this 
relation than they could slip out of the 
grip of gravitation ^or fly above the 
limit of the atmosphere. "All things are 
naked and laid open before the eyes of 
Him with whom we have to do," or "with 

67 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

whom we do business." All men are 
constantly doing business with God. Only 
when this relation emerges in the field 
of our conscious life and becomes obedi- 
ence and fellowship does it become religion. 

All things run up to God for their 
final explanation and completion. "We 
cannot study a snowflake profoundly," 
says Professor Tyndall, "without being 
led back step by step to the sun." Strange 
that the great thinker did not see that 
another step would lead us up to God; 
for "the loaf" takes us back logically, as 
well as poetically in Dr. Maltbie D. Bab- 
cock's verse, through the snowy flour and 
the mill and the wheat and the shower 
and the sun up to "the Father's will." 

The human spirit calls for the Father 
of Spirits as the earth calls for the sky, 
the flower for the sun, and the child for 
the father. Human life is fragmentary 
and meaningless and hopeless until it is 
filled with the fullness of God. "O God," 
cried Augustine, "thou hast i^ade us for 
thyself, and we cannot rest until we rest 
in thee." 

Religion, then, is not an unnecessary 
and redundant addition to our life, a 

68 



THE EDUCATION OF THE SPIRIT 

traditional dogma that has now become an 
outworn superstition and wearisome bur- 
den, but it is just our life itself developed 
to its full completion and finest fruitage 
and blessedness. So far from being in- 
congruous with or unrelated to our edu- 
cation, it is education carried to its 
highest power. 

Education is a poor and pitiful thing 
when it merely develops the body and 
the mind and leaves the spirit starved and 
stunted. Only these spiritual ideals and 
divine influences can raise our life out of 
the dust and lift it star ward. They will 
complete and crown all other results of 
education and round it out toward the 
perfect man. 

To get education we must go to the 
masters who have it and can impart it. 
Personality is ever produced by person- 
ality. It cannot grow in isolation, but 
must unfold in a social atmosphere in 
which like begets like. Education is pre- 
eminently a matter qf personal contact 
and contagion, and the higher it rises 
the more is it subject to this law. 

Religious education must be obtained 
from religious teachers. Christian parents 

69 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

and the ministers and teachers of rehgion 
can impart it in some degree, the prophets 
and apostles of the Bible, being men of 
religious genius touched with divine light 
and fire, can impart it in a greater degree, 
but the master Teacher stands in a class 
by himself, "a Teacher come from God," 
and "He that cometh from above is 
above all." 

Jesus speaks as the Son of God with 
power on earth to forgive sin and cleanse 
us from all unrighteousness and draw us 
into full fellowship with the Father. All 
who come to him in faith and obedience 
shall be renewed in their hearts and slowly 
fashioned into his likeness until they "attain 
unto a full-grown man, unto the measure 
of the stature of the fullness of Christ." 

Spiritual education also uses means, 
books and schools and exercises. The 
Bible is a great textbook, a mass of re- 
ligious literature that stands incomparable 
and supreme among all the sacred books 
of the world, full of light caught by 
prophets and apostles who stood on 
mountain peaks of inspiration close to 
God. It is saturated with the religious 
experience of a race that was gifted with 

70 



THE EDUCATION OF THE SPIRIT 

spiritual genius which was illuminated 
and kindled into splendor by the Spirit 
of God. Altogether it is the greatest 
educational book in the world. Its words 
are spirit and life, and to read and absorb 
and assimilate it is to grow in grace toward 
the stature of the fullness of Christ. 

The Christian home, with its religious 
training and example and atmosphere, 
must ever be a primary center and means 
of Christian education, and the church is 
the school of religion where we come into 
the companionship of common study and 
prayer, and thus gain its mutual help and 
inspiration. And the Christian graces, 
like the mental faculties, must be de- 
veloped and disciplined by constant prac- 
tice and service until they are wrought 
into habit and disposition in which they 
act spontaneously and are crystallized into 
Christian character. 

The Christian school as truly has its 
proper place in our educational system as 
have the Christian hdme and the church. 
The teacher stands next to the parent 
in vital closeness and touch to the child 
and student and insensibly imparts moral 
and spiritual influences to the soul. A 

71 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

Christian teacher, by the unconscious in- 
fluence of his example, without ever say- 
ing a formal word on the subject, can yet 
lead scholars into the Christian life. 

We cannot introduce religious instruc- 
tion into the public school supported by 
public taxation, but we have a right to 
demand and see that the teachers are of 
Christian character and influence and that 
the atmosphere of the school is friendly 
to religious faith and life. A teacher of 
irreligious and skeptical worldly spirit in 
the schoolroom is a contagious danger to 
the scholars. An agnostic, sneering pro- 
fessor in a university can infect the whole 
atmosphere of his room with the germs 
of materialism and irreligion. Most of 
the teachers in our public schools and 
professors in our universities are men and 
women of Christian faith and character 
and influence, and these are the saving 
salt of these institutions. 

But because religious principles cannot 
be expressly taught in public schools it is 
necessary that we should have distinctively 
Christian colleges. These are usually 
denominational schools, either in origin 
and control or else in spirit, and they have 

72 



THE EDUCATION OF THE SPIRIT 

played and still play a large and vital 
part in our educational life. While they 
are necessarily connected more or less 
formally with particular denominations, 
yet they are as a class quite unsectarian 
in spirit and are equally open to youth of 
all religious communions. They are also 
smaller colleges than the great institu- 
tions, and in this they offer the advantage 
of closer work and sympathy between the 
professors and students. These institu- 
tions should be loyally sustained by their 
denominational supporters and by the 
public at large, for they are fountains of 
the most vital education; and our young 
people in choosing their schools should 
consider their claims and advantages. 

A full-grown personality! This is the 
aim and the ideal of education, even as 
outlined and so admirably described by 
Huxley; not a stunted and dwarfed, ill- 
proportioned, one-sided and misshapen hu- 
man being, but one that stands full and 
finished at every point; not an over- 
developed, lusty body with an ignorant 
mind, or a powerful and polished intellect 
with a feeble conscience and low ideals 
and selfish passions, without God and 

73 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

without hope in the world; but with all 
powers — physical, intellectual, and spir- 
itual — developed into symmetrical and per- 
fect personality. 

Yet personality contains other elements 
than bodily vigor, developed intellect, 
regulated feelings, disciplined will, and 
religious character and life. It is these 
plus an atmospheric envelope, an elusive 
spirit that cannot be caught and defined. 
A strong or rich or fine personality has 
something about it that escapes our 
grasp and may be inexplicable to us and 
even to the person himself. 

Some of these atmospheric elements are 
a sincere sense of truth, a texture of 
reality in the soul free from affectation, 
insincerity, deception, or falsity; deep 
convictions that are immovable roots out 
of which the whole character and life 
spring; unity of the soul in which all 
elements, and especially all discordant 
factors, are fused into one molten foun- 
tain and stream; unconsciousness of self, 
for self-consciousness distracts the unity 
and spoils the beauty of the soul, and 
unconsciousness of self is the final touch 
of perfection; a lively sense of interest in 

74 



THE EDUCATION OF THE SPIRIT 

human life in all its forms; effervescent 
feelings, broad and fluent sympathies, un- 
affected unselfishness, a sense of humor, 
kindness and courtesy, grace and charm of 
manner — these and other elements in 
varying degrees and combinations blend 
and melt into that subtle atmosphere that 
surrounds a strong and fine personality, 
and contain its secret. While these elusive 
ingredients that constitute the overplus 
and delicate aroma of personality are not 
under the direct control of the will, yet 
they can be reached indirectly and thus 
can be cultivated. 

This ideal should be the aim of educa- 
tion as it is of religion, and should be 
pursued through all its grades, from the 
primary school up through the university. 
The ideal school will do something for 
the body, for the intellect, and for the 
heart, giving each its due proportion and 
emphasis; and the student and every one 
should be on his guard against a one- 
sided or stunted growth, and should strive 
to keep all his faculties growing together 
that he may obtain a symmetrical educa- 
tion and attain unto a full-grown per- 
sonality and a full-orbed life. 

75 



VII 
EDUCATION AS HABIT 

We are highly plastic beings, and one 
object of education is to mold us into a 
system of good habits. 

1. What Is a Habit ? A habit is an 
acquired fixed way of acting. Anything, 
having acted in a certain way once, tends 
to act in that same way again. A piece 
of paper folded on a line forms a crease 
along which it folds more easily a second 
time; and all material substances are 
subject to this law. A new machine runs 
more smoothly after it has been in use 
for a time, and a suit of clothes grows to 
fit the figure and thus becomes more 
comfortable. 

Organic beings are more pliant than 
inorganic substances and quickly wear 
grooves of action. The human body is 
highly impressionable and easily molded 
into habits. Muscles and nerves, having 
acted in one way once, tend to repeat 
the action, which in time grows auto- 

76 



EDUCATION AS HABIT 

matic. It is thus we learn to walk, speak, 
attend to our work, and carry on all the 
routine affairs of life. 

Ideas, having been associated once, tend 
to cling together, and memory is a matter 
of habit. Judgments tend to repeat them- 
selves and grow into fixed opinions or 
beliefs or prejudices. When we feel in 
a certain way once the same feeling on a 
similar excitation stirs the soul, and thus 
emotional habits are formed. The will 
wears itself into grooves of action along 
which it slips in unconscious smoothness 
and ease. Moral and spiritual experiences 
are repeated and thus character grows. 
"A character," said John Stuart Mill, 
"is a completely fashioned will." 

Under this law of habit the whole body 
and soul are plowed and grooved into a 
system of habits by the automatic action 
of which we live. By far the greater part 
of all our activities, language, learning, 
conduct and character, work and worship, 
becomes cast ^nd cooled in the mold of 
habit. Mental activities not only repeat 
themselves in habits, but also, like seeds, 
bring forth a multiplied harvest. This 
law has been expressed in the familiar 

77 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

saying, "Sow a thought and reap a deed; 
sow a deed and reap a habit; sow a habit 
and reap a character; sow a character and 
reap a destiny." 

2. The Use of Habits, The law of habit 
is of tremendous importance in Kfe. It 
trains us into regular, easy, and accurate 
ways of doing things, releases us from 
debate and hesitation, effort and worry, 
sets us free to attend to novel situations, 
and lubricates life into delightful smooth- 
ness and liberty and joy. 

Its results are seen in the skill and 
often the marvelous perfection with which 
we learn to do our work. The pianist 
strikes the keys of the instrument with 
a rapidity the eye cannot follow and yet 
no finger ever misses a key. At first these 
movements are made with awkward and 
painful effort and are attended with notes 
or noises that no one wants to hear; but 
perfection is reached through the long- 
continued practice by which the muscles 
and nerves are trained into automatic 
action. 

At the same time habits take over 
these acquired activities and release the 
attention and all the faculties of the mind 

78 



EDUCATION AS HABIT 

and organs of the body to do other work. 
We thus walk without paying any atten- 
tion to our steps. If we had to think 
about every step and calculate the prob- 
lem of maintaining our balance, we could 
not do anything else; but we hand the 
whole matter of walking over to habit 
and give our eyes and mind to other 
things. This is an enormous economy of 
our time and attention and enables us 
to do many things at once, while we 
give our conscious attention and effort to 
novel situations and complex problems 
constantly arising which habit cannot 
solve. 

Habit thus enables us to capitalize our 
past actions and acquired skill in an in- 
vested fund of autonomy that carries on 
the general work of life. It is "the enor- 
mous flywheel of society, its most precious 
conservative agent." 

Good habits are steel tracks on which 
we can drive ourselves with speed and 
safety, or they are grooves in which our 
life slips with unconscious smoothness. 
They are the means of our liberty, giving 
to life its freest movement and fullest 
joy. On the other hand, evil habits are 

79 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

chains that bind us and at last become 
bondage and bitterness from which strong 
crying and tears cannot release us. 

We do not do a thing well until we do 
it without thinking how. No one is a 
good mechanic who must think about 
how to hold his tools; and no one has 
good manners who is thinking about his 
manners. Not until the hand has for- 
gotten the painstaking processes by which 
it was trained does it have perfect skill. 
The musician must practice long that 
he may play without practice. So a 
mental principle or a Christian grace has 
not been thoroughly wrought into us until 
it acts unconsciously. Must an honest 
man try to be honest? No, he* will be 
honest without trying. 

"Boy," said a slave buyer to a black 
boy on the auction block in the slave 
market of a Southern city in the old days, 
"if I buy you, will you be honest?" 

"Sir," said the boy, "I shall be honest 
whether you buy me or not." 

Beneath the black skin of that slave 
boy beat an honest heart whose honesty 
was ingrained and automatic and did not 
depend for its action on any external 

80 



EDUCATION AS HABIT 

condition or even on any conscious 
effort. 

Conscience ought to act without being 
asked, or our thinking about it. When a 
man must keep working with his stomach 
and lungs and Kver he has a poor set of 
vital organs; the healthy man does not 
know that he has any insides. So when we 
must keep working with our virtues and 
must prod them into action they have 
not yet been educated into the perfection 
in which they will act spontaneously. 

It is true that we can reach such per- 
fection only through long discipline. We 
must try hard that we may do without 
trying. Moses "wist not that his face 
shone." He was filled with the glory of 
God and then he forgot himself. He did 
not know that his face shone, but others 
knew it. When through the discipline of 
education and divine grace we attain to 
any degree of perfection of personality, we 
do not need to tell others of it: they will 
find it out. * 

3. Rules for Forming Habits. Professor 
William James has a chapter in his Princi- 
ples of Psychology on "Habit" which is a 
classic on the subject. He lays down four 

81 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

rules for forming habits, which we here 
condense and state in nontechnical, popu- 
lar language: 

(1) The first rule is: Begin with all 
your might. When we start on any line 
of conduct with half-hearted decision and 
effort, timidity and hesitation, we are not 
likely to go far: hindrances will easily 
discourage us and turn us back. But 
when we feel the importance of the new 
course of action and concentrate our 
energies upon it we are likely to start off 
with such decision and momentum as will 
carry us through. 

There are two ways of going in swim- 
ming. One way is to creep down into the 
cold water an inch at a time and every 
inch a shiver. The other way is just to 
leap in in one plunge. This concentrates 
all the slow successive shivers into one 
intense and glorious shock. It is then all 
over, and how splendid it is as one comes 
up all aglow with vitality and vigor. Some 
young people start to school or enter the 
Christian life an inch at a time, but the 
way to begin is to take one decisive 
plunge. Settle the matter once for all, 
burn your bridges behind you, and take 

82 



EDUCATION AS HABIT 

a step from which you will not turn 
back. 

In further elucidation of this rule Pro- 
fessor James says: "Accumulate all the 
possible circumstances which shall reen- 
force the right motives; put yourself 
assiduously in conditions that encourage 
the new way; make engagements incom- 
patible with the old; take a public pledge, 
if the case allows; in short, envelope your 
resolution with every aid you know." 
These subsidiary rules admit of easy 
translation into the terms of any par- 
ticular habit or line of conduct. For 
example, in entering the Christian life 
they mean that we should intensify the 
motives for this life, go to church, and 
make a public confession of faith. 

(2) The second rule is: Never suffer an 
exception in the practice of the new habit 
until it is thoroughly established. Each 
lapse is like letting drop a ball of string 
which one is carefully winding up; a single 
slip undoes more than 'many turns will 
wind again. 

A rule given to public speakers is : "Dash 
cold water on your throat every morning 
when you wash, for three hundred and 

83 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

sixty-five, not three hundred and sixty- 
four, mornings in the year." There are 
many habits to which this rule applies 
without exception. Truth, honesty, pur- 
ity, patience, kindness, love — we are to 
practice these virtues always and every- 
where, "for three hundred and sixty-five, 
not three hundred and sixty-four, morn- 
ings in the year." One single exception in 
these things drops our ball and unwinds 
more than we can wind back in many 
turns. 

Rubinstein said that if he omitted his 
piano practice one day, he noticed it; if 
for two days, the critics noticed it; if for 
three days, the public noticed it. We can 
keep ourselves in fine tune and up to 
concert pitch in all our habits only by 
not omitting their practice in a single 
instance. 

(3) The third rule is: Seize the first 
opportunity to act on every resolution you 
make. This warns us against feeling 
emotions and making resolutions without 
turning them into conduct. Such wasted 
emotions weaken us and wither our sensi- 
bilities and make it more difficult for us 
to feel and act the next time. Some 

84 



EDUCATION AS HABIT 

people like to indulge in emotion as a 
sentimental luxury. They even like to 
cry — when it does not cost them anything 
in the way of sympathy and service. 

"The habit of excessive novel-reading 
and theater-going," says our psychologist, 
"will produce true monsters in this line. 
The weeping of a Russian lady over the 
fictitious personages in the play, while her 
coachman is freezing to death on his seat 
outside, is the sort of thing that every- 
where happens on a less glaring scale." 
"There is no more contemptible type of 
human character," he further says, "than 
that of a nerveless sentimentalist or 
dreamer, who spends his life in a welter- 
ing sea of sensibility, but never does a 
concrete manly deed." 

Act! act! is the urgent admonition of 
this rule. 

(4) The fourth rule is: Keep the faculty 
of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous 
exercise every day. That is, be systemat- 
ically ascetic and heroic in little un- 
necessary points, practice your habit on 
the margin of effort where it begins to 
pinch as drudgery. 

Professor James ingeniously likens such 
85 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

asceticism to "the insurance which a 
man pays on his house and goods. The 
tax does him no good at the time, and 
possibly may never bring him a return. 
But if the fire does come, his having paid 
it will be his salvation from ruin. So 
with the man who has daily inured him- 
self to habits of concentrated attention, 
energetic volition, and self-denial in un- 
necessary things. He will stand like a 
tower when everything rocks around him, 
and when his softer fellow-mortals are 
winnowed like chaff in the blast." 

This rule warns us against indulgence in 
relaxing our habit after we have acquired 
it. We must keep our habit in condition 
as the athlete keeps himself in fine fettle 
by gratuitous exercise every day. 

These are the rules of a master psy- 
chologist, who says their "ethical implica- 
tions are numerous and momentous." 
They apply to our whole system of habits 
— physical, mental and spiritual — and they 
will develop in us such habits as will 
make our life regular and certain, smooth 
and delightful, masterful and fruitful. 



86 



VIII 
EDUCATION AND EXPRESSION 

Education develops the power of ex- 
pression. A mind shut up within itself, 
however splendidly it may be endowed 
or richly stored with knowledge, is yet 
a dead sea into which many streams run 
but out of which nothing comes. While 
no mind can be wholly self-contained, 
and every mind must find some expres- 
sion, yet even educated minds differ 
enormously at this point. A mind of 
comparatively meager resources may out- 
strip one of larger and richer mental life, 
because it has freer channels through 
which it can pour itself in forceful streams 
to drive the machinery of the world or to 
fertilize the fields of life. 

Language is one of the most important 
means of mental expression, and is a vital 
part of education. A word is a symbol 
that expresses and transmits thought, the 
sign of an idea, the bridge that connects 
one mind with another, a telegraphic or 

87 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

telephonic wire that discharges the contents 
of one mind into another. It is a winged 
idea which flies from one mind to another 
and there unloads its burden of meaning; 
it is a crystallized thought, which, being 
transported from one mind to another, 
dissolves back into its original thought so 
that the two minds are saturated with 
the same meaning, or they think as one. 

Words are plastic and iridescent to ex- 
press all the shapes and shades of thought. 
They are clean-cut, like sharply minted 
coins, with clearness and precision, or they 
are multilated and muffled with vagueness 
and obscurity. They gleam and sparkle 
with cheerfulness and wit, or they are 
heavy and depressing with dullness and 
stupidity. They are icy cold with haughti- 
ness, or warm with sympathy. They shoot 
to their mark as poison-tipped arrows, 
hissing with hate, or they breathe tender 
and ardent love. They speak poniards, 
and every syllable is a stab, or they drop 
dew and honey. They can forge ponder- 
ous anchor chains of thought, or spin the 
most delicate silken threads of sentiment. 

They weave the web of our common 
conversation, transact all our business, 

88 



EDUCATION AND EXPRESSION 

write our newspapers and books, and pro- 
duce all the glories of our literature. They 
furnish the novelist with the colors for 
his pictures of life, the poet with the 
airy draperies for his dreams, and the 
orator with the majesty and music of his 
eloquence. 

Words have in them the promise and 
potency of all life. They are big with 
the issues of time and eternity. They 
have kindled wars and slain empires, and 
they have been the white-winged angels 
of peace. A single word has saved a soul 
or broken a heart. 

There is no use in seeing things unless 
we can say them; and we do not really 
know more than we can say. Style is not 
thought, but it is the door that sets it 
free, or the dress that makes it attractive, 
or the power that drives it home. Knowl- 
edge is steel in the bar; forceful expression 
is the same steel in the keen polished 
blade. Knowledge is electricity stored up 
in the battery; vivid expression is the 
bright, swift flash. ^ Knowledge is the 
bullet; style is the powder that sends it 
to its mark. 

Wonderful is the power of a striking 
89 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

sentence; phrases have made history. To 
be able to put a thought into forceful 
statement, apt phrase, or brilliant epigram 
is often to carry conviction and win the 
day. 

Some of the primary virtues of good 
style are clearness, conciseness, simplicity, 
directness, purity, force, and finish. Such 
a style costs time and unwearied practice 
and patience, but it is one of the most 
powerful tools of life, one of the finest of 
accomplishments, and is one of the high- 
est products of education. 

"The greatest thing the human soul 
ever does," says Ruskin, "is to see a 
thing and then tell in a plain way what it 
saw." We may not think that he told 
us anything in a plain style in his pages 
of gold incrusted with gems, but then 
he did tell us in a plain way what he 
saw. And former President Eliot says 
that if there be any one mark of educa- 
tion, it is the ability to express one's 
thoughts in clear and accurate language. 
Choice diction is a fine art and a beau- 
tiful accomplishment. Words fitly spoken 
are like apples of gold in baskets of silver. 

This is a faculty and a grace that every- 
90 



EDUCATION AND EXPRESSION 

one can in some degree acquire, and to 
few subjects should students give more 
effort and assiduity as they persistently 
endeavor to discover its principles and 
master its art. The practical value of 
their education will in no small degree be 
measured by their proficiency at this 
point. 



91 



IX 

EDUCATION AND APPRECIATION 

How big is your world? We might think 
that we all see the same stars and that one 
man's world is just as large as another's. 
But not so: everyone's world is bounded 
by his knowledge and insight and every- 
one sees and lives in his own world. The 
ox has eyes as good as ours, but its world 
is confined to its pasture field and feed 
trough and never gets outside of this little 
horizon. Some human beings are yet in 
the bovine stage of existence. 

The scientific man lives in an immensely 
larger world than even the average edu- 
cated person, because he has penetrated 
farther into the spaces and recesses and 
mysteries of nature. "When Alfred Rus- 
sel Wallace," we read, "was gathering in 
South America his botanical and zoological 
specimens, the natives of the Amazon 
Valley thought him mad. He paid them 
handsomely to catch creatures for which 
they could discover no use at all. To 

92 



EDUCATION AND APPRECIATION 

him the great forests of BoKvia and 
Brazil were aHve with sensation. They 
fascinated and enthralled him. But the 
black men could not understand it. They 
saw no reason for his rapture. Yet his 
wonder was not the outcome of ignorance; 
it was the outcome of knowledge." 

The artist sees a world of beauty to 
which other eyes may be blind. When 
Turner showed one of his sunsets to a 
friend and the friend remarked that he 
had never seen such a sunset, the painter 
replied, "Don't you wish you could. ^" 
Ruskin, illustrating Turner's range of 
interest, says of him: "One hour he is 
interested in a gust of wind blowing away 
an old woman's cap; the next he is paint- 
ing the Fifth Plague of Egypt. A soldier's 
wife resting by the roadside is not be- 
neath his sympathy; Rizpah watching the 
dead bodies of her sons not above it. 
Nothing can possibly be so mean that 
it will not interest his whole mind and 
carry away his wholQ heart." As every- 
one sees his own world, the size of the 
world that is seen depends on the size 
of the mind that is seeing. 

Education enlarges and enriches our 
93 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

appreciation and enjoyment of the world. 
It broadens the mind so as to bring it 
into contact with the world at multiplied 
points. The undeveloped man touches it 
at only a few points, mostly those of his 
physical appetites and needs. As the 
mind unfolds it begins to throw out its 
awakened faculties, like so many sensitive 
antennae or tentacles, to lay hold of the 
world, embrace the globe and reach out 
among the stars until they impinge on the 
outmost rim of the universe. 

All the senses are to be trained and 
refined to perceive the wealth of interest 
and beauty in the world to which the 
undeveloped mind is blind. Nature then 
discloses wonders that were never dreamed 
of before. Earth and sea and sky become 
a grand picture language that are ever 
eloquent in thought and replete with 
beauty; blossom and bird, grain of sand 
and stupendous starry constellation are 
crammed with interest and mystery, fas- 
cination and entertainment. 

Science and literature and art are vast 
worlds of the purest enjoyment. The 
educated mind sees the world through the 
eyes of the men of genius who have un- 

94 



EDUCATION AND APPRECIATION 

veiled and glorified it and beholds it 
suffused with many-colored splendor. It 
possesses all things through the owner- 
ship of appreciation, and can say with 
Emerson : 

"I am owner of the sphere, 
Of the seven stars and the solar year, 
Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain; 
Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain." 

Education makes us rich in inner re- 
sources. It fits up and furnishes the mind 
as a home and library that contains the 
means of its own contentment and satis- 
faction. It makes us our own best com- 
pany so that we can have a good time 
with ourselves. "The world is too much 
with us," so that we are too dependent 
on its scenes and excitements. Some 
people are always craving a crowd, itch- 
ing for a new thrill. Left alone, they 
are instantly discontented and miserable. 
They have no inner resources and must 
seek diversion and ei^tertainment outside 
of themselves. 

Education releases us from the tyranny 
of the external world and enlarges our 
inner world of freedom. It brings us into 

95 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

full possession of ourselves and then we 
have found our richest and most abiding 
wealth and worth. The degree of one's 
real education is measured by the width 
and depth and delicacy of its appreciations. 
A narrow and barren mind has few 
interests and enjoyments, and a mind of 
broad education lives in a large and 
wealthy world. Our real treasures must 
ever be within, and we should strive to 
deepen and enrich our minds so that we 
shall be largely independent of the world 
and careless of its vicissitudes. Jesus told 
his wondering disciples that he had meat 
to eat that they knew not. Especially 
does true education enable us to appre- 
ciate relative values in the moral and 
spiritual field so as to put first things 
first and be rich in the things of the spirit. 
Human life is growing increasingly com- 
plex and rich. The savage lives close to 
the ground on roots and in caves and has 
few wants and aspirations and enjoyments 
beyond elementary physical needs. Our 
civilization has built around us an enor- 
mously wider and loftier world of physical 
and intellectual and social and spiritual 
needs and world-wide interests. We now 

96 



EDUCATION AND APPRECIATION 

have countless possibilities of satisfac- 
tion of which primitive people never 
dreamed. Mere physical subsistence has 
become the smallest part of our Ufe. 
We live in the spirit more than in the 
flesh and have affinities with the bound- 
less worlds of science and literature and 
art, of business and trade and travel, of 
national and international affairs, of hu- 
manity and of the outmost circle of the 
heavens. "To me as Antoninus," said the 
Emperor Marcus Aurelius, "my city is 
Rome, but as man it is the universe." 

Blind eyes and deaf ears may be in 
the presence of the most splendid visions 
of beauty and the grandest symphonies of 
music and see and hear no more of these 
wonders than an ox or an oyster. So 
may we live in our grand world and be 
blind and deaf if our mental and spiritual 
faculties are not awakened and trained to 
perceive and enjoy it. A broadly de- 
veloped and richly stored mind lives in 
a vastly bigger and better world than a 
narrow, meager mind'^ because it has more 
soul to see with. We should get educa- 
tion above all other getting in order that 
we may be born into our great modem 

97 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

world, move in its cosmic currents, sit 
in its grand amphitheater, and see and 
appreciate all that is going on, and thus 
enter into our splendid birthright and 
opportunity. 



98 



X 

EDUCATION AND EFFICIENCY 

What use is education? Perhaps a few 
people still think it is of no practical 
use or importance after it has passed the 
common-school grade, and may believe 
it is only a fashionable fad or luxury of 
the rich. Others think it is only a way 
of escaping work and being able to wear 
white collars and cuffs; and still others 
may consider it as the means of getting 
and holding some genteel and easy job 
of standing behind a counter or clerking 
in a bank. 

Such ideas, of course, are mere prejudice 
and blindness. Education is developed 
manhood, disciplined personality, and this 
is the necessary condition of all worthy 
life. Education does not train our youth 
away from practical life and honest hard 
work, but trains them for work. Any 
sort of work, even digging a ditch in a 
street or field, requires some degree of 
knowledge and skill; and as work grows 

99 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

more complicated and finer it calls for 
larger knowledge and higher skill. 

It will not be affirmed that no one can 
achieve success in the various fields of 
life without the education that is ob- 
tained in the higher schools. Occasionally 
there turns up a self-educated man, such 
as Herbert Spencer who has never at- 
tended a university or college, and yet 
attains eminence as a scholar or in some 
other line. But such men are exceptional 
in ability or in diligence, and even they 
might have reached fuller development 
and greater power if they had gone through 
the schools. Even Herbert Spencer would 
have had a more symmetrical education 
and a more catholic mind, and probably 
would have been a sounder thinker, if 
he had had a university training. 

The chief advantage of a school is its 
atmosphere and associations. It is con- 
tagious in its mental and social life. 
There is little education in a book, at 
least for youth, because a book has no 
personality; and it is personality that is 
power in education, so that Mark Hopkins 
on one end of a log and a student on the 
other constitute a university. We send 

100 



EDUCATION AND EFFICIENCY 

our children and youth to school and 
college that they may be immersed in its 
intellectual and social life and come into 
contact with inspiring personalities, and 
then they may absorb the vital spirit of 
education, that subtle element that we 
call culture, through the very pores of 
their skin. 

Such education fits one for his work in 
life whatever it may be. It puts him in 
possession of himself. It develops him 
into a disciplined mind that can thread 
its way through any subject, sift and 
arrange its facts into order, and put them 
together in sound judgments by which he 
can achieve his ends. Education is trained 
ability that can quickly see what is to be 
done and how to do it, and such ability 
rapidly pushes to the front and wins in 
any field. 

The world is becoming more and more 
specialized in all its fields of labor, com- 
petition is growing keener and standards 
are rising higher, and as a result the 
workers of to-day and^to-morrow must be 
more highly trained and more eflScient 
than the workers of yesterday. No one 
can hope to be successful as a lawyer or 

101 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

physician or minister or editor or engineer 
to-day who is not equipped with a first- 
class general and professional education. 
The medical education of yesterday is 
now so antiquated that it would not per- 
mit one to pass an examination for en- 
trance to a medical college. The same 
fact is true of all other old-time learned 
professions, and besides these many new 
professions and technical callings have 
come into our modern world that demand 
a high degree of special training. 

Applied science is the mother of in- 
vention and progress and is constantly 
devising better means and methods of 
agriculture and manufacture and trans- 
portation, and is thus lifting the world 
far above the physical condition of prim- 
itive people. It is the general intelligence 
in the community that enables men to 
learn and carry on the complex mechanical 
processes of our industrial world. Ignorant 
men simply could not make and manage 
these machines; and if we shut off the 
light of education, these great industrial 
plants would wither as vegetable plants 
droop and die in a drought. To maintain 
and improve our intricate material civil- 

102 



EDUCATION AND EFFICIENCY 

ization we must keep up our educational 
institutions, that they may send out 
their stimulating light and irrigating 
streams. 

Many of our business men now have a 
college education, and a man has no 
chance for even entering the learned and 
technical professions without thorough 
preparation. The parents of the rising 
generation should see this, and young 
people should see it for themselves, and 
they should press with eager feet into all 
the avenues of education from the primary 
school up to the higher institutions. It 
is not being maintained or implied that all 
young people can or should endeavor to 
go to college and a professional school, but 
such education is the necessary condition 
of service in these higher fields. 



103 



XI 

EDUCATION AND LIFE 

Education not only imparts efficiency 
in technical work but it also fits one for 
living in all human relations. We must 
beware of materializing education into a 
mere means of making money or winning 
success in life. This is to turn its light 
into darkness, and then how great is that 
darkness! Then a man sees in a field 
only so much corn and pork, in a forest 
only so much lumber, and in a mountain 
only so much coal and pig iron; worse 
than this, he may use his education only 
to get these resources and products away 
from their owners without proper com- 
pensation. But life is more than meat, 
and the body than raiment, and while 
education does produce material goods in 
greater abundance and finer quality, yet 
it does infinitely more than answer for us 
the questions. What shall we eat.^ and 
What shall we drink .^^ and Wherewithal 
shall we be clothed.^ 

104 



EDUCATION AND LIFE 

There are two extreme theories of the 
nature and object of education. The one 
is the view once popularly entertained 
that education is a special privilege and 
artificial distinction, marking a man as 
belonging to a favored class and separating 
him from common work and life. The 
college graduate was viewed as a man 
apart, who was not expected to take 
a hand in the rough work of the world. 
He was pale of face, with a scholar's 
stooped shoulders and unsoiled and un- 
calloused hands. Formerly when a boy 
came back to the farm or village from 
college with the mysterious sheepskin of 
a diploma which seemed to be charged 
with magic charm and power, he was 
regarded as a kind of superior if not sacred 
being, who was idolized by his family, 
treated with obsequious deference by the 
community, and was not expected by any- 
body to do any work. 

College courses were also shaped along 
the lines of preparation for the learned 
professions and a scholar's secluded life, 
and ancient languages, mathematics and 
philosophy were the principal studies in 
the curriculum in which there were no 

105 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

options, while the more practical subjects 
of modern languages and applied science 
were given small room and welcome and 
were rather regarded as intruders from 
the workaday world. This was the purely 
cultural theory of education. 

Extremes beget extremes, and reaction 
is now swinging to the opposite pole at 
which the disposition and often the prac- 
tice is to cut out cultural studies and put 
the emphasis on utilitarian subjects. Al- 
ready Greek and Latin have been cast 
out bodily from many colleges and uni- 
versities and are no longer required either 
for entrance or graduation. Every study 
now must show that it bears on practical 
life, which means business and money- 
making. 

A college graduate on this theory of 
education need not know any other lan- 
guage than his native tongue, unless he 
wants to use it in the markets of the 
world. He need not know mathematics 
beyond the range of his practical computa- 
tions in figuring out his profits and income 
tax. He is not expected to know much 
about philosophy, but he must be able to 
analyze pig iron or know how to cure 

106 



EDUCATION AND LIFE 

pickles. He may know little about the 
soul, or whether he has a soul, but he 
must know all about soils. The pressure 
away from cultural education toward 
utilitarian and technical training for busi- 
ness is gaining in popular urgency, and 
the extent to which even our older univer- 
sities have yielded to this demand is 
causing serious concern to our conservative 
educators. 

There is truth in each of these ex- 
tremes, and the truth as usual lies between 
and combines the true elements of both. 
The true view of education is that it is 
not a means of separating a man from 
his fellow men by an artificial and 
sacrosanct distinction, but of uniting him 
more intimately and usefully with them; 
and it is not simply or chiefly a means of 
making a living but a means of making 
a worthy life. 

/ The educated man is not by his educa- 
tion set apart from or unfitted for human 
society and service; if that were its nature \j 
and effect, the less of it the better. Edu- 
cation is not an easy way of escaping work 
and living without perspiration. It is not 
synonymous with starched linen and a 

107 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

silk hat. Even the white necktie has lost 
its significance and is almost as likely to 
be worn by a gambling sportsman as by a 
minister. ^ 

The educated man is by his education 
all the more a man, developed and full- 
grown in all his faculties, fitting into 
human society in all its relations and the 
more efficiently filling his place and doing 
his work in the world. He has wider 
visions and more fluent sympathies so 
that he is able to enter into other men's 
conditions and needs and rights more 
fully and helpfully. Instead of being 
narrow-minded and lopsided by reason of 
his education, he is more of an all-around 
man,full-orbed in his human nature and life. 

It goes without saying that there is 
truth in the utilitarian theory of educa- 
tion. Preparation must precede practice 
in every field. We are not born with 
skill, but only with the possibility of it 
in germinal faculties that may be un- 
folded and trained into skill. No one can 
offhand run a locomotive, or perform a 
surgical operation, or preach a sermon, 
or play a piano. We cannot extemporize 
a wheatfield. 

108 



^ 



.j^ 



EDUCATION AND LIFE 

But, on the other hand, there is a vital 
truth in the cultural theory of education. 
Preparation for any work must be broader 
than the work itself. One cannot become 
a good lawyer or physician or minister 
by rigidly confining his preparation to law 
or medicine or theology; he must have a 
broad knowledge of other subjects for 
efficient service in these fields. Even a 
mechanic needs to know more than simple 
acquaintance with the tools and materials 
with which he works. To do what one 
does well he must know more than he 
does. Whatever enlarges the mind and 
enriches the emotions and disciplines the 
will prepares for better work in any field. 

This is why young men now go to 
college to prepare for any line of work as 
well as for the learned professions. All 
knowledge is related, and Greek and 
Latin, logic and philosophy are not remote 
from and useless in the practical affairs 
of life, but contribute to that general 
training and broad thinking that are the 
basis and means of success in any field 
of service. 

The old education aimed at general 
culture, and so far it was right; but it 

109 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

went too far in separating culture from 
life. The new education is in danger of 
going too far in the opposite direction of 
divorcing life from culture. We must 
keep the two together and make them 
help each other and round out life into 
its full-orbed sphere. '' Living is the chief 
duty of life, and education is to enable 
us to do this chief thing better and raise 
it to its highest level of fullness and 
efficiency. » 



110 



XII 
EDUCATION AND SERVICE 

All these powers of education should 
run up into service. A highly complicated 
and costly mechanism, such as a watch 
or a locomotive, should pay for itself in 
work done. The more expensive it is 
the more work it should do. An educated 
personality is a very expensive product; 
society has taxed itself heavily to pro- 
duce it, and therefore it should justify 
itself in service rendered. It is deep 
selfishness and base ingratitude for one 
to acquire an education that equips him 
with large powers and then turn them 
to purely personal ends, such as money- 
making or pleasure-seeking, or to mere 
aesthetic culture, or to gilded ease and 
idleness. 

Education that simply lets one slip 
through the world so as to escape pro- 
ductive work and avoid one's share of 
responsibility for the world's welfare is a 
blight to the community and to the soul 

111 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

itself. This turns the soul into a sponge 
that sucks up everything around it, in- 
stead of making it a fountain that sends 
forth refreshing streams. The educated 
man is that much more of a man and 
should be of that much more use to the 
world. His eye should be clearer to see 
human needs and his heart kinder and his 
hand abler to meet them. His shoulder 
should be the stronger and the readier 
to go under the burdens of his fellow 
men and to help carry the load of the 
world's need. His presence should be so 
much wisdom and inspiration and cheer 
in his own circle and in the community. 
The wider his education, the stronger 
and richer his personality, the wider and 
deeper should be his sympathy and service 
and sacrifice. Much has been given to 
the educated man and woman, and of 
them is much justly required. 

The educated man and woman enter 
the world as so much leaven to impart 
the contagion of higher life to others. 
They go out as light-givers and light- 
reflectors to radiate and diffuse light 
through the whole community. It is 
highly important that we should have 

112 



EDUCATION AND SERVICE 

professionally educated people among us, 
but it is more important that we have 
general intelligence and ethical character 
diffused through the whole mass of society. 

The mountain ranges and peaks must 
send their waters down to irrigate the 
plains, or their value vanishes. So the 
social value of professional scholars con- 
sists of their power to stimulate and enrich 
the common people. 

It is not the direct light of the sun 
that fills our homes and illuminates the 
world, but the sunlight as it is reflected 
and diffused everywhere by the countless 
particles in the air. Educated people have 
freely received light, and now they should 
freely give it. For them to receive the 
light of education and then refuse or fail 
to impart it to others would be as selfish 
as if they, having found their place in 
the sun, were then to try to crowd others 
out of its light, or were to try to absorb 
all its light and shut it off from the rest 
of the world. We get this light that we 
may give it; and, in fact, giving it is the 
best way of getting it, and in this field 
it is literally and abundantly more blessed 
to give than to receive. 

113 



XIII 

EDUCATION AND PUBLIC 
SUPPORT 

The social blessing of education is the 
reason it should and does receive public 
support from the common school up 
through the high school to the college and 
university. Some people may look on this 
support as a way of taxing the many in 
the interest of the few, but this is a short- 
sighted view. Our schools of all grades 
are fountains of intelligence that pour 
their streams out over our whole human 
world as the clouds shed their rain over 
all the hills and valleys. Shut them up or 
curtail them by withholding public sup- 
port, and we would dry up or diminish 
these streams at their source, and then 
all our life would wither in the drought 
and blight. 

We owe it not only to our children and 
to all our youth, but also to ourselves to 
keep these sources of education well sup- 
plied. In hardly any other way than by 

114 



EDUCATION AND PUBLIC SUPPORT 

these taxes does our money do so much 
good for us and for our human kind, and 
to cut off this support would be to save 
a few dollars at the expense of personal 
and public disaster. No one is so unin- 
telligent as not to see the use of the 
clouds in the atmosphere and the sun in 
the sky. Everybody ought to have the 
discernment to see that our schools are 
clouds full of rain and suns radiating light, 
and be glad to contribute to their support. 
Our higher institutions of learning are 
almost without exception in pressing need 
of larger endowments, and they make a 
strong appeal to men of vision that have 
means to aid them. Such gifts are a wise 
investment that will long serve the world. 



115 



XIV 

EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP 

The great men of the world are its 
makers. They create history. They are 
the mountain ranges and peaks that de- 
termine the course of rivers, carve the 
continents, build the plains and sow them 
with wheatfields and orchards and cities. 
Cut them down to the level of common 
men, and the whole history of the world 
would be altered and dislocated. Abraham 
and Moses, Isaiah and Paul, Alexander and 
Csesar, Plato and Socrates, Confucius and 
Buddha, Shakespeare and Milton, Wash- 
ington and Lincoln, Newton and Darwin 
— how would the course of history have 
been changed and the level of the world 
lowered if these great personalities and 
creative geniuses had not upheaved the 
continents and pushed up the peaks of 
civilization! From the slopes and sum- 
mits of their thoughts and deeds have 
descended streams that have cut the 
channels of history and watered the plains 

116 



EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP 

of the world. And who can calculate the 
enormous and infinite loss to the world 
were Christ stricken from the centuries! 

War that strips off all our illusions 
and uncovers things down to their naked 
reality is a terribly severe teacher of the 
necessity of competent leadership. Lin- 
coln was handicapped through three years 
of failure in the Civil War until he found 
"a man that would fight." He found 
Grant, and then that dogged fighter 
forged the scattered links of the Union 
armies into a continuous iron ring around 
Richmond that soon forced its surrender 
and the collapse of the Confederacy. 

The Great War taught the same lesson 
on a colossal scale. The Allies muddled 
through three years of mistakes and dis- 
asters with divided generalship and isolated 
armies and broken fronts. At last the 
necessity of dire extremity and imminent 
ruin forced unity of action under a single 
head, and almost from the day that all 
armies along all fronts were placed under 
the supreme command of Foch, the Ger- 
mans were checked and then turned back 
and kept on retreat until they were beaten 
to their knees, begging for mercy. 

117 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

This man, however, was no accident or 
favorite of fortune. He did not get his 
place by seeking it, much less by political 
favoritism or wire-pulling, but he was 
the product of long and severe prepara- 
tion. From youth he had been a student 
of military affairs, for years he was a 
professor of tactics in a government mil- 
itary college, he had been tried out in 
the arduous school of experience on the 
field of battle, and so at last he stood 
forth by the principle of natural selection 
as the one man fitted for and equal to 
the great place and mighty work that fell 
to him in a supreme hour and crisis and 
agony in the history of the world. 

But not only are these overtowering 
personalities the makers of the world, but 
so also in a lesser degree are all those 
who are called to places of leadership 
among us. The statesmen of any coun- 
try to-day hold its destinies in their hands. 
The captains of industry are the builders 
of our great business enterprises, and 
without their leadership these vast com- 
binations of capital and labor would go 
to pieces. The newspaper editor wields 
an enormous influence in shaping and 

118 



EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP 

coloring as well as disseminating informa- 
tion and in determining public opinion. 
The lawyer leads in his field, the physician 
in the hospital, and the minister in the 
pulpit. Quiet thinkers in their university 
chairs and investigators in their observa- 
tories and laboratories are leaders in the 
fields of widening knowledge and are 
thereby molding the thoughts of millions 
of men and of coming generations. Every 
city or community or country is largely 
what its leaders have made it. Bolshevism 
began by murdering its "intelligensia," 6t 
its intellectual and ruling classes, and then 
came swift-footed anarchy and chaos and 
night. 

The fields of leadership have multiplied 
in our day, and demand thorough prep- 
aration as never before. No one is born 
with a birthright of leadership since kings 
have so generally gone out of business; 
and even kings must get ready for their 
office through long and arduous prepara- 
tion. Rarely is leadership the result of 
mere favor or fortune. Young men in 
beginning their work often look up to the 
men in high places and wonder how they 
got there; and they are apt to think that 

119 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

these successful men were boosted into 
their positions by powerful friends or by- 
some kind of "influence," or that they 
climbed up by cunning arts and intrigue. 
And so they are in danger of setting about 
seeking and getting such places by illegit- 
imate means. 

It is not to be denied that there is some 
measure of good fortune in such success 
and that influence does often put men in 
desirable places. But let no young man 
count on these things. Few are the men 
in high positions who got there by such 
means. Washington was not an accident 
in his day, and Lincoln was not picked 
out and put in his place by partisan 
politics. Great men have blazed their 
own way to fortune and left footsteps 
behind them for us to follow. Worthy 
leadership cannot be inherited or bought 
or got by influence, but must be won by 
rising on the arduous steps of deeds done. 

Education is the necessary preparation 
for leadership in our day. An ignorant 
man can only follow the leader or boss 
and do the lowest work in the world. 
Even to be a good farmer or mechanic 
now demands trained intelligence, and 

120 



EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP 

young men go through the high school 
and the college to follow these callings. 
Much more does it require a high degree 
of preparation to be fitted for leadership 
in teaching, journalism, engineering, large 
business management, as well as in law, 
medicine, and the ministry. 

The ministry especially calls for men of 
large ability and clear vision and ample 
equipment of expert knowledge and skill 
to lead the Christian forces of this age in 
the immense task of working out the 
social gospel and building the kingdom 
of God in the world. 

Let no one be so shallow and conceited 
as to think that he can succeed in any of 
these specialized fields without proper 
training, and if he is so ill-advised and 
foolish as to try it, failure is his sure 
fate. It is no longer respectable or lawful 
to attempt professional work without a 
professional diploma. The price is high, 
but the privilege and the reward are great. 

Never did the world demand such high 
leadership as it must have to-day. It 
now lies shattered at our feet by the war^ 
and upon us is thrown the gigantic task 
of rebuilding it into a better world. We 

121 



THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 

ought to be glad that we are alive in this 
great day and have a part in this immense 
work, "dwelling in a grand and awful 
time, in an age on ages telling," when 
simply "to be living is sublime." It gives 
us something great and worth while to 
live for, and it will help to make us great 
if we throw ourselves into it with utmost 
devotion. But only competent leaders 
can guide and inspire this work, and only 
those who have native abilities which 
they have developed and trained to their 
utmost powers can be such leaders. Let 
our youth get ready for their task. 

**God give us men. A time like this demands 
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready 

hands. 
Men whom the lust of office does not kill! 
Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy! 
Men who possess opinions and a will! 
Men who can stand before a demagogue 
And damn his treacherous flattering without wink- 
ing. 
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog 
In public duty and in private thinking." 



122 



l.S'^'^Y O"^ CONGRESS 



019 811 520 4 






